the construction of british ‘asian’ criminality

The Construction of British‘Asian’ Criminality

COLIN WEBSTERSchool of Social Sciences, University of Teesside, U.K.

Introduction

This paper extrapolates from a 6-year study of delinquency and victim-ization among Pakistani, Bangladeshi and white young people in the Northof England. The study involved a three-stage research strategy. First, a4-year quasi-longitudinal study of 70 victims and perpetrators of racialviolence and offending. Second, a self-report crime survey of 412 13–19year-old Asian and white young people, 7% of the age group living in thearea. Third, an in-depth follow-up study of 65 young people.

The essential argument is that over the period studied, from 1988 to1995, we can observe the construction of a popular and public discourseabout young ‘Asian’ masculine criminality said to reside in certain Britishlocalities. An important source of this build-up of a public discourse aboutAsian criminality can be found in national and local press and televisionreports and representations which have focused on areas having significantAsian minority populations [1]. The characteristic feature of this discoursewas the way in which ‘Asian’ young men were reassigned a ‘subjectposition’ (Keith 1995a), from being categorized as primarily law-abidingand/or victims of crime, especially racial violence, to being associated withcriminality, drugs, violence and disorder, and that the roots of this allegedcriminality lay in generational tensions brought by the breakdown of Asianfamily controls on young people. Further, that the sources of theseracializing and criminalizing [2] discourses are found not only in thecontrol culture — by which I mean the media, the police and the criminaljustice system — but also among white and Asian young people on thestreet and among certain sections of the Asian parent culture. Within thediscourse itself, we need to disentangle the various representations of ‘Asian’criminality and their sources, from local and national media to police andparent cultures [3]. Although this theme runs throughout the paper, someconnected supplementary arguments will be used, the most important of

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which is to question the usefulness of ethnic and cultural attributes such as‘Muslim’, ‘Asian’ or ‘black’ for comparing or predicting victimization,delinquency and crime. These categories are misnomers that contribute to,and construct stereotypes of, victimization and criminality in police, public,and criminological discourse. They rest on cultural essentialism of one kindor another, that is “disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity ofanother culture, people or geographical region” (Said 1991: 108). In otherwords they deny the fluidity and variety of cultural identity and humanbehaviour.

The structure of the paper is; first, to review these police, public andcriminological discourses about ‘race’, crime and young people, and howthey impact on attempts by the control culture to construct a specific formof Asian criminality. Second, to examine briefly evidence about theprevalence of delinquency and crime among blacks and, particularly,Asians compared to whites, noting the discrepancy between the findings ofofficial and self-report approaches, and the fact that young people ingeneral, and Asians in particular, continue to be major victims of crime.Finally, to suggest that explanations about crime among so-called ‘Asians’rely on ideologies of ‘Asianness’ that impute binary attributes of bothdiscipline and disorder. This paper argues that these popularist, ‘Orien-talist’ ideologies are premised on an homogenizing and unchangingidealization of ‘Asian’ family life and community structure. The form ofthose essentializing ideologies is that family and communal-based informalcontrols on youth are said to have produced an essential capacity for law-abiding behaviour and delivered low crime levels.

However, so the argument goes, external threats to the communityposed by the secularization and westernization of its young people havecreated a situation whereby both accommodation and resistance to thisthreat generate tension between and within generations, causing wide-spread cultural alienation, loss of community controls, disorder andcrime.

The empirical focus from the 6-year study, however, demonstrates howthe development of loose self-defence or vigilante groups among youngPakistanis and Bangladeshis as one type of response to racist violencecoincided with the replacement of narratives of racial attacks on the Asiancommunity with stories of ‘Asian’ juvenile delinquency, so that defensivecollective action by Asian youths becomes reconfigured and re-framed, soas to construct them as perpetrators of racial attacks and as associated withstreet disorder and crime.

Public Discourses about ‘Race’, Crime and Young People

A long, and often dishonourable, tradition of official and popular

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discourses about race and crime (see Hall 1978; Fryer 1984; Pitts 1993) wasrecently extended by the contributions of two senior police officers [4].The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Paul Condon, announced Opera-tion ‘Eagle Eye’, aimed at targeting ‘black muggers’, in the summer of1995. In commenting on the disorders in Bradford, West Yorkshire, in June1995, Keith Hellawell, Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police, identifiedthe roots of these disorders in a widening cultural and generation gapwithin the ‘Asian’ community, stating “Cultural and religious leaders havebeen worried for the past 10 years or so that the younger generation don’tfollow their teachings and feel that they have great difficulty in controllingthem” (quoted in the Independent, 12 June 1995).

The key, if implicit, effect, if not purpose, of police strategy however, isto institute a split between respectable and disreputable, criminal elementswithin the black community and urge black leaders to defend the blackcommunity against its criminal elements. Chief Inspector Dalton McCon-ney, the most senior black officer in the Metropolitan Police and one of thekey architects of Eagle Eye, said “We believe that the only way that the blackcommunity can rid itself of its criminal image is to recognise the problemand get rid of it” (quoted in the Guardian, 12 August 1995). In the areastudied, this split is instituted between the Asian community leadershipand parent culture, both of whom are constructed as proprietious andrespectable, and its youth, who are said to be out of control. The patternthat applies to police discourses about young black Londoners begins torepeat itself, only this time in relation to an altogether new folk devil —the young Asian criminal, drug pusher or rioter. At the same time, policediscourse becomes joined to a wider discourse of community leaders [5].Now, although there are important senses in which this police and populardiscourse reflects what is actually going on, it serves at the same time toamplify and exaggerate popular racism in the wider context of ademonization of Islam, accompanied by stories of Islamic fundamentalistyouth groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir, of Asian ethnic inter-gang rivalries,vigilante groups, drug crime, ‘no-go areas’ and the like [6]. Where this hashappened, we can expect to see, eventually, a corresponding changeupwards in the police statistics of Asian arrests, delinquency and crimerates.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the police, in their operationaldecisions, are constructing Asian criminality with the co-operation andcollusion of Asian community elders who wish to tighten their rein on whatare seen as ‘uncontrollable’ and ‘disruptive’ elements among Asian youth[7].

Some of the propositions and premises on which this operates in policeand public discourse are summarized below:

The Construction of British ‘Asian’ Criminality 67

(1) That the police in their public discourse, and with tacit support fromAsian community leaders and elders, have evoked and instigated a splitbetween what is deemed to be a respectable, proprietous anddisciplined parent culture and elements of the youth culture seen asinvolved in drugs, crime and disorder.

(2) This is designed to elicit support and crime intelligence from theparent culture mobilized so as to reassert discipline and control overuncontrollable elements who are alienated, excluded and unem-ployed. Tacit police-community co-operation is meant to solve analleged crime-control problem for the police whilst solving culturaland religious-control problems for elders and community leadersarising from conflicts within Asian, and particularly Pakistani andBangladeshi, Muslim communities. These conflicts and tensions arefound between traditional and modernist versions of Islam, betweenIslamic and Muslim social identity and westernization, and tensionsarising from very high levels of youth unemployment and low levels ofeducational achievement.

This control strategy, however, is unlikely to meet with successbecause:

(1) Asian young people as a whole come to feel racialized and crim-inalized by the police, as the ‘rough’ and ‘respectable’ split onlysucceeds in ‘painting them all with the same brush’ which, in turn,backfires on the police as the parent culture withdraws its support forpolice actions, as these are increasingly perceived as the police‘picking on’ their young people.

(2) Neither the police nor the parent culture are able to address orrationalize to Asian young people their cumulative and persistent‘failure’ to take up educational and employment opportunities,against the background of a decline in the demand for unskilledlabour at the same time as there are demographic pressures on thelocal labour market.

The overall conclusion of this section is to ask whether the Bradforddisorders mark a watershed in what seems to have become an unofficialand cumulative construction of ‘Asian’ criminality, which began in earnestin the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the sense of affirming in the public andofficial mind an already pre-established readiness to target young Asians asa potentially criminal population. Representations of Asian criminalityhave almost invariably focused on youthful masculinity and the publicstreets through which ‘the youth problem’ becomes visible. A whiteaudience ‘knows’ these stories, which accounts for the high levels of

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receptivity within local and national media. They appeal to a knowledgethat predates the moment of representation (Keith 1995a), because aracialized repertoire is already in place. Here, again, we see the emergenceof a new ‘folk devil’ that replicates in significant forms the alienation ofAfro-Caribbean youth from the police and criminal justice system in the1970s, rehearsed again in relation to South Asians [8].

Criminological Discourses about ‘Race’, Crime and Young People

Criminological discourses, at least from an empirical perspective, havetended to complement rather than critique official media and publicdiscourses about ‘race’ and crime.

Prevalence: discrepancies between police and self-report data on ethnic offending

My own local crime survey administered in 1992 measured, among otherthings, prevalence of delinquency among a representative sample of Asianand white young people. This area study can be compared with the 1993national survey of 2,529 young people administered by the Home Officeusing an almost identical questionnaire device. This, the first compre-hensive, nationally representative study of self-reported offending byjuveniles and young adults in England and Wales, confirmed and validatedthe findings of my area study; that Asians — those of Indian, Pakistani andBangladeshi origin — have significantly lower rates of offending thanwhites or Afro-Caribbeans who have very similar rates of offending(Webster 1995; Bowling & Graham 1994; Graham & Bowling 1995) [9].Figures 1. and 2. show offending rates by ethnic origin for young peoplewho admitted ‘ever’ offending found in the two surveys.

The implication is that either ethnic minority youngsters are less truthfulthan whites in an interview situation, or that whites exaggerate theiroffending and blacks do not, or that the official statistics reflect racial biasby the police and criminal justice system.

Although there is certainly cause for concern about offending levelsamong young people in general — involvement in offending is widespreadwithin this group — at present there is little evidence to suggest thatoffending among Asian young people is any more worrying than offendingamong other groups, certainly not so as to support a growing ‘moral panic’about ‘Asian crime’ [10]. Indeed, the victim part of my survey founddisproportionately high levels of criminal victimization among white andAsian young people (see Figure 3.).


100

0Propertyoffences

50

60

40

30

20

10

70

90

80

Violentoffences

Expressiveoffences*

Drugoffences

Fare/license/

insuranceevasion

Alloffences

*Here include arson, vandalism and graffiti.

Source: Webster, C. (1995) Youth Crime, Victimisation and Racial Harassment:The Keighley Crime Survey.Centre for Research in Applied Community Studies, Bradford.

Demography: is there a demographic time bomb within the Asian community?

Some writers (FitzGerald 1995) argue that we are likely to see a trend ofrising crime in the future among Pakistani and Bangladeshi young people— ethnic minorities hitherto known for their low levels of offendingcompared to other groups. The argument is demographic in that the twogroups are much lower in age structure than other groups and are aboutto hit the peak period of offending [11]. Fitzgerald goes on to warn aboutthe danger of a new moral panic. Now although these arguments certainlyaccord with local figures from the study area, which suggest that the size ofthe mostly Muslim population falling into the peak offending ages of 14–20is set to double over the next decade, and population projections suggestthat Asian young people will be 25–30% of the total youth population inthe city at the current peak offending ages in 5 or 6 years time, this meansthere will be a rise in the numbers of Asian young people offending inparticular localities rather than a rise in the proportion who offendcompared to whites. However, this demographic profile may be com-pounded in a situation where there is likely to be a continuing decline inthe demand for poorly qualified youth labour, and where youth unemploy-ment among young Pakistanis and Bangladeshis has already approached

Figure 1. Local survey of cumulative participation in offending by ethnic group (%). C, White;G, Asian; F , All.

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45

0

40

30

20

10

5

15

25

35

BangladeshiPakistaniIndianBlackWhite

'Expressive offences' are: vandalism and arson.

Source: adapted from Graham & Bowling (1996) Young People and Crime.Home Office Research Study 145.

70

0Personally

been avictim ofviolence

50

60

40

30

20

10

Homebeen

burgled

Homevandalized

Personalpropertydamaged

Vehiclestolen

Propertystolenfrom

vehicle

Vehicledeliberately

damaged

Bagsnatched

Source: Webster, C. (1995) Youth Crime, Victimisation and Racial Harassment:The Keighley Crime Survey.Centre for Research in Applied Community Studies, Bradford.

60%, and where half of these groups of young people currently leaveschool without any qualifications, compared to 20% of whites who leavewithout qualifications (BMDC 1995; Jones 1993) [12].

The social significance of this demographic boom (through the timing

Figure 2. National survey of cumulative participation in offending by ethnic origin (%). C,Property offences, G, Violent offences; F , Expressive offences; H, All offences.

Figure 3. Local survey of cumulative male victimization by ethnic origin (%). F , Asian; G,White.


and pattern of family reunion) of young Asians, is the increased visibility ofyoung British Asians on the streets in specific localities that lack facilitiesthat are an alternative to the street, whilst at the same time these streets areinscribed with racial danger (see Webster 1995; Keith 1995a).

Over-representation

Smith (1994), in one of the most comprehensive reviews of the evidenceand debates about race and crime, argues that although South Asians areas much the victims of racism as are blacks, this is not manifested in highlevels of criminality. What is intriguing about Smith’s argument is thatbecause Asians are not over-represented among offenders described byvictims, persons arrested, or in the prison population, then this refutes thecharge that there is a generalized racist bias in the police and criminaljustice system. Instead, it is argued, black people are subject to bias, but thatthis isn’t necessarily racist, and may be justified in so far as blacks have ahigher rate of offending. The point here is that Asians may be as subject toracist bias as blacks; it’s just that racism towards Asians takes a different form.After all, we know from studies of sex bias in the criminal justice system thatwomen are treated both more harshly and more leniently compared to men,depending on their family and sex role status. We shall be returning to thiswhen we look at ideologies of ‘Asianness’.

There are two main problems with this type of approach:

(1) As demonstrated by Burney’s (1990) study of street thefts in Lambeth,regular as opposed to occasional black offenders are only a smallproportion of black youth, and tend to be a hard core of persistentoffenders which sully the reputation of the majority of wholly innocentand law-abiding young Afro-Caribbean men. My study of offendingamong young Asians arrived at similar conclusions about a coreoffending group. Because these offending groups are not representa-tive of the whole group, explanations which point to the generalcharacteristics of this social group do not get us very far. Smith, likeothers, does not disaggregate specific offender groups.

(2) We should be asking then, what characteristics, if any, distinguishblack/Asian young people who routinely get into trouble and thosewho do not. What characteristics, if any, distinguish offendingbehaviour among black/Asian young people from offending behav-iour among young whites, once having taken into account class, sex,locality and so on (Stenson 1996).

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Explanations and Ideologies of ‘Asianness’, Crime and Criminality

Control and strain theory: cultural essentialism

The only other studies to have looked at crime and delinquency amongAsian young people (Mawby & Batta 1980; Wardak 1995) stress the culturalattributes of Muslim communities which inhibit law breaking as comparedto white communities. Nevertheless, Mawby and Batta’s (1980) study whichcovered young offending in the 1970s predicted an increase in offendingamong young Asians if low educational and employment prospects wereprolonged and cumulative, within the context of a demographic rise in theproportion of 0–15 year-olds in the Asian compared to the whitecommunity.

Mawby & Batta’s (1980) study, Asians and Crime: The Bradford Experience,argues that Asians [13] tend to be over-represented amongst groups withrelatively high crime rates (working class, poor, inner city, etc.), and yettheir crime rates are lower than average, despite their over-representation inthe high risk categories or situations, therefore we should focus on thestrengths of such communities. The study goes on to offer an explanationthat relies on control theory — Asian family and community informalcontrols are said to be greater than for other groups despite similarexperiences of economic and social deprivation. The key then, toexplaining low Asian crime rates lies in “the strength of the subcultural‘support’ (or perhaps ‘control’)” (p. 52).

However, Mawby & Batta distinguish between explaining the mechanismsof control and the handling of crises, that is, how a subculture explainsfailure to its members, and the solutions it provides for those in need(p. 54–55). Controls rely on community enforcement and family prestige(izzat), the latter being key to controlling family members in that deviancewould have repercussions for family, both in Britain and Asia, withadditional economic impact in terms of marriage potential. AlthoughMawby & Batta emphasize positive reinforcements such as family supportand the ‘quality of family life’ among Asians compared to non-Asians, theimplication is that the conditions which sustain these cultural attributesmay not last [14]. In a similar vein, Ali Wardak’s study of young people’soffending in the Edinburgh Pakistani community set out to refashioncontrol theory so as to apply to the culturally specific informal controlswhich were inherent in this community [15].

For these types of cultural essentialist criminological arguments, the keyquestion therefore is whether, and to what extent, Muslim young peopleare socially bonded, attached and so on, to the cultural and socialinstitutions of a specifically Muslim parent culture, which is seen in unitaryand homogenized ways.


Differential racism: orientalism, propriety and disorder

It has been suggested, then, by commentators on Muslim communities,that they still have a strong sense of ‘public propriety’, honour, prestige(izzat) and shame. Now, general discourses about the prevalence of crimehave relied upon the notion of public propriety (see Cohen 1979: 124)applied to a given population. ‘Propriety’ is defined as: appropriateness;seemliness; decency; conformity with good manners; conformity withconvention in language and behaviour; and so on. This notion institutesthe split between the ‘respectable’ upholders of public propriety and its‘rough’ challengers (with its charge of latent criminality and disorder).This distinction is implicit in Hellawell’s comments about respectable,conforming Asian Elders and an unruly Asian youth (see the Independent,12 June 1995). Such assumptions of collective guilt are resented by Asianyoung people, yet become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with all the consequentalienation from the guardians of respectability — Asian elders and thepolice.

Jefferson (1993) argues that racism directed at Asians by the police andcriminal justice agencies is different from that directed at blacks; thestereotypical and racist connotations of ‘Asianness’ are different from‘blackness’. Taking this further, we might say that Asian otherness has beenconstructed around a more deferential set of images within a neo-colonialdiscourse about western perceptions of ‘easternness’ — orientalism:‘Asianness’ as feminine, devious, untrustworthy, rigid, unproblematicallyrooted in communal and family life, etc. (see Said 1991; 1993) [16]. Whilstthese constitute a mixture of positive and negative features, they do notlend themselves easily to criminalizing discourse; quite the reverse —Asians are seen as intrinsically law abiding. The particularity of the Asianstereotype, with conformity and controlling familial and community tiescentral to it, militates against invoking the discourse of criminality. That is,until recently. A discernible shift has taken place whereby Asian masculinityhas come to be associated with the criminal other, demonstrating howracial stereotypes and their mode of operation shift over time [17].

Empirical case study

The case study illustrates the mechanisms through which racial stereotypesof Asians changed in one locality from 1988 to 1994 through young Asianschallenging the territorial preferences of young whites and white racistviolence. Specifically, how certain streets and areas came to be seen amongwhites as feared signifiers of dangerous Asian territorialization (Webster1995, 1996; Keith 1995b: 297).

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Initially, in the area studied, white on Asian violence declined for a numberof reasons:

d An increased availability and use of drugs other than alcohol haddiverted white perpetrators from attacking Asians;

d An increased availability of leisure facilities for Asian youngsters, wherenone had been available before, had taken them off the street, reducingtheir visibility and availability as victims;

d Increased knowledgeability about the timing and location of racialincidents had created avoidance strategies.

However, the most important factor resulting in a decline in racistviolence was that Asian youngsters became increasingly adept in establish-ing, maintaining and extending ‘safe areas’ through loosely organized self-defence groups that deterred white incursions into their areas. Thisinformal vigilantism (see Johnston 1992: 159–179) developed alongsidedemographic changes within certain predominantly Asian areas where theAsian community was longer established, creating a disproportionatepresence of older Asian males. These demographic assets meant they werebetter equipped to defend their areas. Previously, younger Asians had beenintimidated by older whites. These older Asian young people, then, hadcome to have a creditable presence in their own areas in terms of creatingdefensible space based on territory. Asian territorialism, however, also hadthe effect of creating white perceptions of these areas as ‘no-go areas’ forwhites, and that any white on Asian attacks would invite swift retribution.

The overall and unintended effects, however, were that on the one hand,white young people came to perceive themselves, rather than Asians, asvictims of violent racism, and that on the other, young people’s ‘colourcoding’ of areas as ‘white’ or ‘Asian’ were confirmed and reinforced. Thestudy found that more whites than Asians said that they had been victimsof violent racism and abuse, and that the same proportion of Asians aswhites said they had perpetrated violent racism and abuse [18]. Further,that these experiences were highly patterned according to locality andthere was a consistent perception and fear of violence and abuse based interritorial rivalries. Clearly, the unexpected finding, supported across therange of data, that more whites than Asians perceived themselves to bevictims of racist violence, problemizes accepted views of what constitutesracism and its victims. I would like to address this issue briefly and thecontext of the ways in which young whites come to describe and constructAsian on white violence as ‘racist’.

The sequence of events — putative cause and effect — were that somewhites, despite their increasing anxieties about ‘Asian’ areas, initially felt incontrol of their areas and unrestricted in their movements, whilst at the


same time, through a growing resentment and hostility towards Asians,sought to invade certain streets, parks and areas considered to be ‘Asian’,attacking and trying to drive out their inhabitants. Because of factorsalready mentioned, white territorialism became increasingly limited in itsscope and was subsequently modified by an increasing Asian response andresistance to its destabilizing effects on Asian areas. The form of this Asianresponse was to oppose white resentment through carving defensiblespaces out of a hostile racist environment. Violent racism, as a result,substantially declined in the area. A situation was created, then, whichoffered conditions where whites were able to construct a discourse in whichthey defined racism in terms of their own status as victims, even to theextent of sometimes seeing themselves as inhabiting small, white enclavessurrounded by a hostile Asian environment. Whilst inverting the ‘real’geographies of power and position between Asians and whites, this imaginarygeography had a basis in fact at a particular time; some whites were beingattacked by some groups of Asians who created for themselves, what Cohen(1993) calls a ‘nationalism of neighbourhood’.

A growing perception began to be shaped in the minds of whiteyoungsters, the police and local agencies, which associated Asian self-defence and territorialism with street disorder and criminality, throughwhite perceptions of an Asian ‘offensive’ and experiences of being attackedby Asians. White territorialism inadvertently generated an Asian challengeaimed at ‘turning the tables on whites’, which created those veryconditions that whites complained about to the study; that attacks onAsians had declined and attacks on whites had increased, enabling whiteyoung people to portray racism as something that black people inflict onwhites in the form of violent racism and abuse aimed at whites, and thatAsians were a threat to public order (their order). A further consequence wasa growing perception among the police and local agencies of Asians gangs,involvement in drug abuse and criminality.

In reality, close study of ‘Asian’ communities reveals widespreaddifferences and variation within and between such communities —multiple identities (see Lewis 1995). This does not describe Hellawell’s“alienation from every aspect of society including their own community”,but a healthy reinvention of different forms of Muslim identity. What iscertain is that the omnibus ‘Asian’ implies a sociologically and culturallyhomogeneous, minority ethnic group. However, my ethnographic studyrevealed highly differentiated and distinctive groups. These groupsdiffered according to factors such as whether their responses to racismwere ‘respectable’ or not; their involvement in drug use and criminality;their different rates of victimization, and so on.

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De-homogenising ‘Asian’ Youth

Drawing from the case study we [19] found that the conformists — themajority of Asian young people — generally keep out of trouble and avoidsituations in which there might be racial violence or attack. They identifywith and defer to community elders and their traditions of ‘publicpropriety’. They belong to the mainstream of Asian Muslim culture and areboth adaptive and distant from secularized British culture. They arefundamentally law-abiding. They, like their parent culture, tended toblame and implicate other Asian young people for their involvement incrime and/or inter-racial violence. Good behaviour, it is thought, willeventually be rewarded with offers of accommodation or assimilation fromthe white ethnic majority.

Experimenters, on the other hand, display a fierce independence fromtheir parent culture. Their cultural preferences and tastes are for thoseelements of music, magazine and video culture that emphasize fusion andhybridity; ‘modern’ Hindi films and ‘Indie’ music, Bhangra, and a ‘pick n’mix’ orientation to drug use (see Baumann 1990; Back 1996). They weremore likely to have been involved in fighting and disputes about territorialclaims and access to amenities and resources between whites and blacks,although more recent conflict had erupted surrounding the control anduse of drugs, and inter-gang rivalries.

Vigilantes tend to be older Asian young people and experiencedcombatants are looked up to by younger ones as providing protection anda defence of Asian territory. These loosely organized defensive oraggressive vigilante groups are lead by ‘toughies’; physically strong, big and‘hard’ Pakistani youth who regulate or patrol given or claimed areas orterritories. They oppose the Asian parent culture’s ‘respectable’ responseto public improprieties such as prostitution, drunkenness and racistviolence, preferring direct action. Asian elders, in turn, chastise this groupfor bringing dishonour upon the community. Vigilantes express gravedoubts about the ability or willingness of the police to tackle theseproblems, and seem more concerned with controlling and moving Asianyoungsters on, and seeing them as a social order problem [20]. Amongvigilantes are the Heroes or experienced combatants — ‘veterans’ —admired by younger Asians for their capacity to provide protection anddefend Asian territory. It is this group more than any other among Asiansthat is held responsible for defending Asian territory and attacking whites,and has influenced young white perceptions of Asians as a threat in waysdisproportionate to their actual numbers in the Asian youth population.

Islamists consciously identify with a version of Islamic ‘fundamentalism’and distinguish a merely ‘Muslim’ from an Islamic identity. Some of thisgroup supports a local ‘Asian’ band named Fun-da-mental (this is actually‘fusion’ music and connotes self-parody and an ironic theme), whose gigs


are more political rallies in which PLO dressed musicians evoke samples ofLouis Farrakhan, Malcolm X, and Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.This group and its following are rejected by community elders and wererecently banned from two Asian music TV shows (Lewis 1994: 180). Theydo, however, join the vigilante movement to rid ‘Asian’ areas of streetprostitution, white drunkenness and drug dealing.

‘Go-betweens’ or ethnic brokers (see Werbner 1991) tend to be mostassociated with certain forms of occasional criminality, specifically acting as‘fences’ and dealing drugs. In spite of some racial hostility, shared activitybecomes possible, created by a common drug culture and, in some cases,crime.

Those young Asians who were involved in delinquency and crime werelikely to receive corporal punishments and beatings from family members.Some groups were involved in a lot of offending and tended to be repeatoffenders. This group had their counterpart within the white studypopulation. This is a small, hard, core of committed persistent offenderswho are involved in a remarkable range of offences. The incidence ofoffences like street robbery, however, is low within the Asian group. Finally,it should be remembered that we found high levels of both racial andcriminal victimization among many of the young people we spoke to, andthat young people generally experience high levels of criminal victim-ization (see Anderson et al. 1994; Loader 1996).

Conclusion: Against Cultural or Ethnic Essentialism as a Predictor ofCrime and Delinquency

Any notion of ‘community’ (having shared values, something in common)predicated on the identifier ‘Asian’ or any other ethnic attribute is dubiousbecause of cross-cutting religious, regional and class factors. Specifically,ethnic attributes such as ‘Asianness’ that are held to be responsible for lowcrime levels (or potentially high crime levels), homogenize highly dynamicand differentiated cultures, and are not good predictors of either law-abiding or criminal behaviour.

Police and public discourses ‘explain’ Asian criminality by, it is claimed,the loosening of control of the parent culture, where parental control isalways seen as the panacea. What is pernicious about this idealization of the‘Asian’ family is not only, as we have seen, the ways in which a generationalsplit is instituted between a respectable, proprietous parent culture and anunruly and unrespectable youth culture, but also between deserving andundeserving minority ethnic groups. As Pitts (1993: 112) argues, “Thedenigration of Afro-Caribbean culture finds its corollary in the idealizationof Asian culture”, through the device of contrasting the imaginary Afro-Caribbean and Asian family. Thus “the fantasy of the Afro-Caribbean family

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is of a rudderless ship pitching and tossing in a turbulent sea”, by contrastto the fantasy Asian family, seen as “a tranquil house built upon the solidrock of tradition” (ibid.: 112). However, it is the quality of parents’relationships to their sons and daughters which predicts the likelihood ofdelinquency, not the ethnicity of familial or parental culture (Webster1995; Graham & Bowling 1996). Further, parental and family controlsthemselves require to be understood in the wider social context of a ‘crisisof the family’ (see Dallos & McLaughlin 1993). What is striking about theMuslim communities we studied were the very high levels of cumulativeand sustained relative deprivation and poor educational performance[21]. To paraphrase Mawby & Batta, educational ‘failure’ and unemploy-ment cannot any longer be rationalized away and justified to young peoplein ways that neutralize their debilitating effects, as each age cohort sees inthe next its hopeless prospects. Meanwhile, Muslim parents themselvesexplain this loss of control by pointing to western secular pressures thatcompete for their young people’s attention and allegiance. Anotherinterpretation is that pressure for change is coming from Muslim youngpeople themselves and that many Muslim parent campaigns (Honeyford,Rushdie, etc) reflect alarm about the maintenance of control within thecommunities, more than about the threat from a non-Islamic worldwithout (Lewis 1994: 73). It is fear of loss of control that animates Muslimparent activity.

Although these substantial Islamic communities share common con-cerns, they are also marked by enormous differences. ‘Islam’ as suchcannot explain how Muslims behave, or how they might/ought to behave.Other factors outside of ‘Islam’ must be invoked. The resort to an all-explanatory ‘Islam’, Muslim or Asian category is therefore circular.Moreover, these ‘Muslims’, as much as the rest of us, have multipleidentities, the relative character and balance of which change over time(Lewis 1994: 75). The racialized habit of describing British Muslims as‘fundamentalist’ presupposes a unitary notion of Islam. The same can besaid of the category ‘Asian’ in terms of a unitary notion of ethnicity. Thesecategories simply do not hold out any promise of the type of community and parentalcontrols that are envisaged as solutions to delinquency. The geographicalprovenance of these communities from the poorer regions of AzanKashmir, Mirpur and Syhlet of the South Asian continent has meant lowlevels of parental education and skill from which we have seen a transitionfrom status as immigrant workers to underclass which no idealized notionof cultural support will compensate.

The overall conclusion, sadly, is that the Asian parent culture, like thepolice and other control agencies, has been unable to address, accom-modate or engage with the social and cultural experiences of large sectorsof its young people, caught as they are between essentialist and fixed


notions of cultural tradition, and the realities of Muslim cultural flux andexperimentation [22]. This unbearable ambivalence and tension thenbecomes resolved in imaginary ways and translated into a notion ofcontagion in which criminality is ascribed to what is often merely socialdeviance. Meanwhile, those Asian young people who are persistentoffenders are so for the same reasons as their white counterparts: theubiquitous age-crime curve falls on Asian, particularly Pakistani/Bengali,youngsters; cumulative relative deprivation over a generation in thecontext of a failure of the education system to credential the majority ofthese youngsters; the continuing doldrums of the youth labour market;and an inability of social institutions to address the needs and desires ofyoung people, cut adrift and left alone to make sense for themselves of theconditions which surround them.

Notes

1 Malone and Foster, in an article titled “Asian Youth Rebel Against Good Image”(Sunday Times, 21 August 1994), blame the alleged development of Asian gangsand rise in Asian crime in Oldham on the disintegration of Asian family life andyouthful disobedience, and cite police concerns about drug dealing. The samearticle reports incidents of Asian gang violence against whites in Camden, NorthLondon and street disorders in London’s Brick Lane as evidence of “thebreakdown in law and order among some young Asians”; An article in The Times,22 February 1993 about alleged Asian criminality is headed “Family ChainsBegin to Give”; West Yorkshire Police’s Assistant Chief Constable, NormanBettison, commenting on Asian young people in Bradford, suggested “Theyouth seem to be rising up as much against society and elders as against thepolice” (Guardian, 17 June 1995); Disturbances involving young Asians in theAlum Rock district of Birmingham in April 1996 were blamed on Asian-policeconflict in a local newspaper article headed “Riot Police called to Inner CityDisturbance” (The Birmingham Post, 10 April 1996). The same disturbance washeaded “Mob Rampage on City Street” in another local paper (The Evening Mail,10 April 1996); In an article headed “Divided Loyalties”, Martin Wainwright inThe Guardian (12 June 1995) “looks at the deep roots of cultural conflict” lyingat the heart of the Bradford Asian community. Although reporting a localcommunity worker’s view that the Asian parental generation are constantlyvoicing concern about drugs — “They feel strongly that drugs are a danger totheir community. The police know that some people in that community areinvolved, yet they can’t get information out of the community about it” — andinferring that “The trouble, from the police’s point of view, is that evidenceagainst the Asian community’s own rotten apples is very hard to get; a tightcommunity closes ranks more tightly”, Wainwright concludes “there was scantevidence of any split between older, more patient members of the communityand the younger generation”; A BBC Panorama programme in 1993 whichprofiled the Bradford Muslim Community portrayed this community as an‘Underclass in Purdah’, where drug abuse and crime was rife; Chadhary, in an

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otherwise interesting article titled “Enter the Rajamuffin” (The Guardian, 15September 1995), quoted a criminologist, David Smith (of whom more later),as saying “We will have young people of Asian origin not being so locked intotraditional ways and communities.” (Some of these articles were brought to myattention by Fozia Sadiq who has recently completed her BA dissertation “AngryYoung Men: A Study into Asian Criminality”, University of Central England).

2 Following Miles (1989), ‘racializing’ means the attribution of certain behavioursand traits to particular groups of people defined by surface physical featuressuch as skin colour. ‘Criminalizing’ processes emphasize those aspects of certaingroups’ behaviour which can be defined as criminal, hence reinforcing thelikelihood of members of such groups coming into contact with the police andcriminal justice system. Of course, racialization and criminalization can operatetogether (see Keith 1993).

3 My own study has been quoted in the press, radio and television in an attemptto construct Asian criminality and disorder. Its specific contextualization in alocal history of racist targeting of Asians by whites has been consistently ignoredin favour of moral panics about Asians creating ‘no-go’ areas for whites and soon.

4 The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Paul Condon, wrote to black commu-nity leaders in summer 1995, stating that “very many of the perpetrators ofmuggings are very young black people, who have been excluded from schooland/or are unemployed” (Guardian, 8 July 1995). Although arguing that a“significant proportion of robberies were committed by a small minority ofyoung black people”, the Metropolitan Police attempted to allay fears thatyoung black men would be unfairly treated (Guardian, 30 November 1995). Inthe end we may still be left, at least in the public’s mind, with the racist paralogicthat ‘most muggings are committed by blacks, therefore most blacks aremuggers’. This despite the care that Condon and other officers have taken inidentifying a small, hard core of perpetrators, separating ‘ethnicity’ from theperpetration of crime and outlining structural deprivation experienced byyoung blacks.

5 Mohammed Ajeeb, the former Lord Mayor and deputy leader of BradfordCouncil, explains that “Gradually the cultural and religious values and parentalcontrol are being eroded and being replaced by Western standards and values.This means the community no longer has the influence it once did over theactions of some of its youth”. Max Madden, the Labour MP for Bradford West,adds “(Asian young people) are finding conflicts within the Asian family and areno longer accepting the traditional hierarchy. They are leaderless and there areno longer the conventional community elders for the police to communicatewith” (both quoted in the Independent, 12 June 1995).

6 See note [1]. The advent of a militant Asian youth movement in Southall andBradford in the 1970s began the process whereby a different set of imagesbegan to emerge about Asian youth as being more combative, less deferentialand more ‘crime-prone’. This continued in the 1980s occasioned by highlypublicized demonstrations surrounding the Honeyford affair in 1986 and theRushdie affair in 1989. Since the Gulf War and in the wake of the Rushdie affair,there has occurred a demonization of Islam (see Hippler & Leug 1995; Lewis1994).


7 It is likely that this is more a reflection of the parent culture’s alarm about themaintenance of control within communities, than about the threat from a non-Islamic, western, secular world without (see Lewis 1994; Hippler & Leug 1995).Meanwhile, Muslim young people develop vigilante forms of self-defenceagainst racial attacks and public displays of impropriety — white drunkennessand prostitution — on the basis that they are under-protected and over-controlled by the police.

8 Evidence from elsewhere seems to support this conclusion. For example, Keith’s(1995a) study of Bengali youth in the East End of London relates how a seriesof disturbances in the East End of London, loosely connected to fights between‘gangs’ of young Bengalis, were luridly reported in the local press, and the waysin which these representations create and constitute a racialized link betweenBengali masculinity and the streets of the East End. He concludes that Bengaliyouth “have become increasingly seen through a lens of criminal danger, by thelocal and now the national press, by the police force and by the collectedinstitutions of the British state.” (p. 562). Keith’s argument is worth consideringin full because of its efficacy and support for the argument presented here inrelation to other British localities. In the locally specific understandings ofyoung Bengali people in the East End in the early 1990s through representa-tions in both newspapers and political debate, “it is possible to find thedisplacement of narratives of racial attacks on the Bengali community withstories of juvenile delinquency and gang violence. In the local press andnational press, increasing coverage was given to the phenomenon of Bengali onwhite ‘racial attacks’, a term increasingly used by journalists to describe cases ofdelinquency involving young Bengali men with white victims.” (p. 560) This isa reconfiguration of the social problem of ‘racial violence’, reframing themeaning of the term ‘racial attack’, to stand for incidents mostly involving casesof theft and robbery against white victims by Bengali perpetrators. In these ways,a facet of ‘normal’ juvenile delinquency comes to organize an institutionalunderstanding of a whole community. Importantly, such understandings can betriggered off by particular places; a dangerous estate or a ‘specific’ location.

9 Although self-report studies, which ask representative population samples to saywhether they have offended over a bounded time period, contain their ownproblems of methodology, they are considered more reliable than officialstatistics. Most self-report studies seem to indicate that minority groups havelower prevalence rates than indigenous youth, while they are heavily over-represented in official police statistics (see Junger 1989, 1990; Bowling 1990).

10 My own survey was occasioned by police concerns about growing levels of crimeamong Asian young people.

11 Fitzgerald argues “In 1991, 19% of whites were aged 0–15, compared with 22%of Afro-Caribbeans, 29% of Indians and 43% and 47% respectively of Pakistanisand Bangladeshis”. With a fifth of whites, compared to over a half of Asians,belonging to this age group, “Inevitably, we are facing a likely upsurge incriminal involvement among these groups.”

12 My own study found 50% father’s, 95% mother’s and 60% youth unemploymentamong Asians, compared to 11% father’s, 24% mother’s and 42% youthunemployment within the white sample (16–19 year-olds). It is the dispropor-tionate number of young people in these ethnic groups and experiencing these

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social conditions that is likely to see a rise in prevalence of offending, which soworries official agencies.

13 The study uses the outdated term ‘immigrant groups’.14 “…in order to remain unchallenged, it is not sufficient for an ideology to be

able to control deviance and potential deviance. It must include explanations ofevents to allow failure to be interpreted in such a way that deviant reactions arenot provoked; it must provide legitimate alternatives to failure” (Mawby & Battaibid: 55–56).

15 Wardak (1995) shows how these relatively ‘closed’ communities are sociallyorganized, and how social and moral order is maintained. This is essentially aquestion of social control and the specific informal social controls that areinherent in British Muslim communities. These are the institutions of thefamily, the Biraderi (the social network of kinship/friendship relationships), theMosque, and the Muslim Association (whether Pakistani or Bangladeshi). Theseinstitutions operate as mechanisms of social control through informal processesof honour (izzat), prestige and shaming, expressed through an ideology of‘public propriety’ or ‘respectability’.

16 According to Edward Said (1991) the orient has helped define Europe (or theWest) as its “contrasting image, idea, personality, experience”… and is “one ofits deepest and most recurring images of the Other.” (p. 1–2). Historically andcontemporaneously, for the British, this contrasting and imaginary Other hasbeen the South Asian (Indian orientalism), the Muslim and the Arab. Inpopular and official discourses about crime and criminality this contrastingimaginary Other occupies a position within a complex array of ‘Oriental’ ideasabout those ‘without’ and those ‘within’, from the ‘modern’ view about thepious law-abiding Asian to a demonization of Islamic fundamentalism, incontrast to ‘older’ ideas about Oriental or ‘Asian’ backwardness, despotism,splendour, cruelty and sensuality. “…the Orient and Islam are always repre-sented as outsiders having a special role to play inside Europe.” (p. 71)… “hencethe vacillation between the familiar and the alien’’ (p. 72). These are the resultsof “imaginative geography and the dramatic boundaries it draws” (p. 73). The‘Asian’ becomes the criminal Other within.

17 As Keith (1995b) argues: “The placing of non-white masculinity on the street isa constitutive feature of the process of race formation and the manner in whichracialized identities are linked to processes of criminalization.” (p. 306), butalso evokes “common sense geographies of racism” — “the racializedmasculinity of the dangerous street.”

18 The combined data from the three methods used revealed that violent racismand abuse in the area studied had changed in pattern and character such thatwhite on Asian attacks had declined and Asian on white had increased in thecontext of an unfolding story of Asian vigilantism based on territorialism. 40%of whites compared to a third of Asians reported to the survey that they hadbeen victims of racist violence. Further, in following cohort members from 1988to 1992, it became increasingly apparent that the dynamic processes under-pinning the patterning of violent racism were changing.

19 The in-depth follow-up study from whence this typology derives relied on theinterviewing skills and contributions of ideas from Fabbeh Husien, Liaqa Shiek,


Ingrid Hall and Alex Sommerville, all colleagues at Bradford & IlkleyCommunity College. I interviewed the white males.

20 The Bradford disorders arose in part from a ‘Muslim’ sense of a lack of law andorder on the street; public displays of white drunkenness, fracas and fighting,and drug dealing that went on late into the night. This type of vigilante activity,which is based on an overwhelming and confident presence of Muslims in thislocality, can be contrasted to other, more defensive, forms in outlying areasmore isolating for Asian communities, where the predominant issue is racistattacks against Asians. Both these forms — reactive and defensive — actuallybelong to different experiences within Asian communities and their member-ships are quite distinct; one dominated by young ‘Islamists’, the other by a moresecular notion of ‘Muslim identity’ as a form of social and cultural solidarity.The disorders, however, were essentially anti-police.

21 We found 60% youth unemployment, 50% father’s and 95% mother’sunemployment. Half of Pakistani and Bangladeshi young people leave schoolwithout any qualifications compared to only 20% of whites. Muslim commu-nities in the area studied to some extent adapted to the collapse of the textileindustry — the main employer of Muslim Asians — in 1979, by generating aneconomy internal to the Asian community based on self-employment (see Jones1993). Any continued expansion of this alternative economy is unlikely and theevidence is that it has exhausted its capacity to accommodate even a smallproportion of its youth.

22 To the extent that there is a growing generational tension, then this isexacerbated more by a growing linguistic gap between English-speakingyoungsters who are not fluent in Urdu, the language of the faith, than ‘culturalalienation’ and the like. In terms of the hope of religious leadership, the ’ulama(preachers/teachers of the faith) are remote from young British Muslims whoare only fluent in English, whereas the majority of ’ulama are not bilingual anddo not have an informed understanding of British culture or dilemmas facingyoung British Muslims. Meanwhile, Muslim parenting is often experienced asoppressive, erratic, over-harsh and unsympathetic. Institutionally, mosques donot provide for youth nor address their needs, whilst elders and Council ofMosques reject Bhangra music, unlike Islamic youth groups who have realizedthat a more nuanced view towards music is likely to win them a hearing (Lewis1994: 181). Many aspects of new Muslim culture simply bypass the ’ulama. Thesocial control religious leaders can exercise is diminishing, yet youngsters retaina Muslim community identity (p. 202).

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the construction of british ‘asian’ criminality

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